LINGUIST List 3.24

Mon 13 Jan 1992

Qs: Synaesthesia, Diachrony, WH-Questions

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. ,sd, Re: Query -- Synaesthesia
2. Dave Eddington, Diachronic Development of Inflectional Endings
3. Victoria Muehleisen, Query: WH-questions in non-standard English

		Is there anyone out there doing work on (verbal, metaphor)
	descriptions/phrases involving synaestetic transference(s) --
	[an example of such would be, say, a line in a poem in which
	piano music is not describe in sonic terms, but as, say, blue,
	or warm and fuzzy, or lime-flavored; Nabokov was a synaesthete
	and gives such examples in his autobiography and works]? I
	am trying to collect examples towards a couple of papers on this
	and related topics. Verbal or textual; any language (it would
	be nice, though, if you provided a translation); any time period.
		Thanks to all for help or/and insightful comments.

		P.S. -- I AM also interested in actual neurological
	synaesthesia, and would appreciate info on it, but my focus
	is more towards the beforementioned realms.


				Sean A. Day
				Purdue University

The discussion on diachronic lengthening brings another related question
to mind. The drift of the Indo-european languages has been toward
the loss of inflectional endings with the result that word order becomes
crucial (as well as prepositions) in determining case. Are there languages
 thathave developed inflectional systems where there once were none?

David Eddington

I'm a graduate student at Northwestern, and I'm interested in looking at
WH-questions in non-standard Enlish dialects, especially in Black English.
I've read some of Labov's work from the 60's and early 70's, but I haven't
been able to find much recent work on this topic. I would appreciate any
references. I would also like to locate a body of data (tapes,
transcripts, etc.) from a single consistent dialect which I could analyze
for this purpose. Of course, I'm willing to cover the costs involved in
copying and mailing the data.

You can e-mail me at: vicmcasbah.acns.nwu.edu